


Meet the Parents

by brightly_lit



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst and Humor, Brother Feels, Brotherly Affection, Brotherly Bonding, Family Issues, Gen, Light Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-29
Updated: 2017-09-29
Packaged: 2019-01-06 19:09:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12217128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brightly_lit/pseuds/brightly_lit
Summary: When Amara said she wanted to give Dean what he needed most, she didn't mean just Mary, she meant John, too--the whole family back together.  Maybe it's what he needs, but it sure isn't what he expects.





	Meet the Parents

Amara said she wanted to give Dean what he needed most, and then he heard a grunt in a nearby field--it was Sam! That was good; Sam was okay, and now Sam knew Dean was okay, too ... only when Dean got there, Sam wasn’t alone. It was--

“Dean.” Dean scanned the crinkly, smiling eyes desperately for signs of evil, of demon possession, of shifteriness, of anything to indicate this wasn’t who it appeared to be, but ....

“Dad?” Dean whispered, stunned.

“Mary!” said Dad, and there she was, looking just like she looked when she died all those years ago. His father clutched her close. 

Dean looked wildly to Sam, who, after getting his own bearings, was also staring at the sight of their long-dead parents embracing there on the dirt.

 

It was a miracle; it was unbelievable; it was, as Amara had suggested, what Dean had always most needed, or at least wanted: his whole family back together. So why did he just feel annoyed, stuck here in the back seat of the Impala? Sam’s knees were wedged into corners. He looked desperately--and okay, hilariously--uncomfortable. Of course Sam should have the passenger seat, since he was the tallest! ... except of course their mom should have it. Right? But it definitely felt odd to be two thirty-something men who’d saved the world (multiple times, if anyone was keeping count) relegated to the back seat like a couple of little children.

Especially since apparently Dad only had eyes for Mom. That was natural, Dean supposed ... except he had a lot to say to Dad, about a lot of things, and the way Dad was looking at Mom, he wasn’t sure he’d ever get a chance.

Mom and Dad back together, though ... that was something, huh? Holding hands like a couple of kids who’d just fallen in love. Dean had longed for this almost all his life. So why couldn’t he seem to enjoy it? He made an attempt to smile at a still bewildered Sam. Dean shook off his irritability. He was probably just tired from the world almost ending and almost dying and all ... again.

 

Also, why couldn’t he just keep his mouth shut? When Dad made noises about getting a hotel room, Dean told him the bunker was only a couple of hours ahead and they may as well just keep going until they got home. When Dad asked what was this ‘bunker’ where they were residing, Dean told him, with some pride, that it was a Men of Letters bunker.

“No,” Dad said instantly. “No, that is a shady organization and I don’t want you having anything to do with it. You need to move out of there asap.”

Dean chuckled a little, mirthlessly, eyeing an equally disbelieving Sam. “Um, well, your dad didn’t seem to think so,” Dean couldn’t help but say.

“What do you know about that?” John snapped.

“Well ... he kinda ... came back. We met ’im.”

“My father??” Dad was astonished. “Where is he? Can I see him?”

“Uhh ... no. He’s ... dead.”

“How?”

Dean shrugged. “A Knight of Hell got ’im.”

“And why didn’t you stop him?!” Dad demanded.

“Her. Um, well, you know, Knights of Hell are pretty hardcore. It wasn’t that easy ....”

Dad was enraged. It was all coming back, how driven Dad was to save every possible life; how hard on himself and his sons he was whenever they failed, however impossible was the task he’d set for them, insisting that any such death was ‘on them’; his frequent fury and disappointment. Dean was always disappointing him. Even after Dad had been dead for years, Dean still felt like he was always disappointing him, but somehow, that feeling had faded over time. Sam didn’t fly into rages. He didn’t hold Dean to impossible standards. If Dean did something stupid, Sam laughed it off, or commiserated. Sam didn’t pretend he was perfect, either. They were just two hunters, doing the best they could. All too often, failure was the name of the game. It had been hard, but Dean had eventually come to terms with the fact. Dad, evidently, never did.

As Dad launched into a furious lecture about responsibility and how Dean needed an “attitude adjustment,” Sam got diplomatic, explaining better than Dean had exactly what they were up against when Henry died, and noting they should be enjoying all being back together again, instead of instantly at each other’s throats, as had always seemed to be the case before Dad died.

Mom picked up on this. “You all didn’t get along ... after I died?”

“Being on the road all the time, tensions flare,” Dad tried to explain it away.

Mom seemed alarmed. “What do you mean, ‘on the road all the time’? Why were you on the road?”

To say Mom was upset to learn Dad had raised them as hunters would be an understatement. “How could you-- Why would you--?” she began, before biting her tongue, as if ... well, as if she felt it would be wrong to fight “in front of the children.”

“This is already a giant fucking disaster,” Dean muttered to Sam, who said nothing, but his agreement was plain for Dean to see on his face, although come to think of it, Sam was so inscrutable, Mom and Dad might not have been able to see it.

“Dean, language,” John said sharply.

 

Of course Dad insisted on getting the hotel. At least he let Sam and Dean get their own room. Dean shuddered to think what they might be getting up to in there after being apart for so long ... except that soon enough, he knew exactly what they were getting up to in there--he could hear them fighting through the thin wall that separated the two rooms. Dad always picked the crappiest hotels.

“You missed out on this,” Dean said to Sam, trying to lighten the mood. “Now you finally get to have the full experience of growing up with Mom and Dad.”

Sam was pulling off his shoes, not looking like his mood was lightening any. 

“What?” said Dean.

“I just don’t understand this. How can the first thing that happens when we’re all finally back together be that we’re fighting?”

Dean shrugged. “Lotta water under the bridge.”

“You’d think we could set it aside for a while!”

Of course Sam kindly included himself when he was the only one who _wasn’t_ fighting. Dean sighed. “I’m sorry. I guess I just can’t keep my mouth shut.”

“It’s not you!” Sam insisted, to Dean’s surprise. “There was nothing wrong with anything you said. It’s just ... can’t Dad see that we’re men now? We know more about hunting than he ever did. We know more about ... he barely knew a thing about demons when he died!--”

“And now we’re buddies with the King of Hell. Probably better keep that on the down-low,” Dean suggested with a smirk.

Sam shook his head. “I wanted this for so long. All those years, I felt like I was ... psychologically stunted or something from never knowing my mother, growing up in a broken family. Dean, I thought--I really thought that if Mom were still around, we would be happy, you know? That Dad wouldn’t be so driven and angry, that we could have a normal home and a normal life, that I would never have had to be a hunter. That everything would be _okay_. And here we are, back together, and ....”

“Everything sucks?” Dean suggested.

Sam just nodded. “Yeah. Dean, was it--was it like this when you were little?”

“Sometimes. They fought. Dad drank.”

“I thought it was happier than sad, most of the time.”

“I did too, but I was four; what did I know?”

They sat, saying nothing, for a few minutes, before Dean said impishly, “Just like the good ol’ days, huh?”

Sam made a face. “Yeah. Exactly like the ‘good ol’ days.’”

 

Dean realized that somewhere in his mind, he’d assumed Sam had always been sore about the “good ol’ days,” that he’d always harbored resentment toward their dad for all the things the two of them were always fighting about, only seeing them together now, Dean realized Sam was over it. Patient and tolerant of Dad’s caprice and hot temper, Sam found a way to defuse most situations before they escalated. Huh. Dean was getting a window into what it would have been like if they’d grown up with the whole family together, and it looked like Sam would have been the peacemaker. Weird.

Yeah, Dean was getting a window into everything, including things he’d just as soon never have known about his parents. He kept trying to pass it off as merely the consequence of their already being grown men, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that maybe, just maybe ... it wouldn’t actually have been that great to have had a normal upbringing, after all. It used to drive Dean crazy that Sam fought with Dad all the time, but at least he was expressing himself, finding himself, whereas he was so eager to please their mother, Sam had taken to hiding some of his wilder tendencies from her, becoming hardly Sam anymore at all. That was no fun. 

Dean couldn’t be repressed, and Mom didn’t like it, sometimes reprimanding him like a naughty little boy with his hand caught in the cookie jar. (That had actually happened when he was three, and she’d reacted just like this.) Dean had been aware even as a teenager that the way Dad let them run pretty wild, getting up to all kinds of no good--training them in criminal behavior, no less--was pretty questionable parenting. He’d wished often for a sensible, maternal presence to just ... rein them all in, set them straight when they went crooked, but suddenly, Dad’s parenting style wasn’t seeming so bad. Dean was who he was and nothing was ever going to change that. Having a new person around who seemed perpetually troubled, maybe even disappointed, by all Dean’s rougher edges, wasn’t doing anything for anybody.

Dad refused to let them go back to the bunker except to pick up a couple of changes of clothing, radiating disapproval the whole hour they were there. Dad was taking advantage of his new lease on life to try to start over, the way he’d always meant for it to go: to get a job, to get a house in a nice place, and the whole thing made Dean want to puke. Even Sam watched, bewildered, as the father who consistently picked the seediest hotels and sleaziest hunter buddies, who chastised young Sam and Dean for being 'too soft' when they complained about having to sleep another night in the Impala, picked the most cookie-cutter, Stepford suburban neighborhood imaginable and set about trying to build a life there. This wasn’t Dad! Or if it was ... then who was the John Winchester who had raised Sam and Dean?

Sam and Dean each had a bedroom in the furnished house Dad had rented. Dad was urging them to also get jobs, talking over them when they informed him hunting was their job. “It doesn’t pay!” said Dad.

“It saves lives,” Dean retorted.

“Yeah, well, what about our lives?” Dad said heatedly. “We finally have a chance to live them now! Why do we have to sacrifice everything?”

Dean remembered standing in front of his father’s grave, asking him this very question, and knowing exactly what Dad’s answer would have been back then. Dean glared at him, stalked back to his room, and slammed the door.

“This is a rental!” Dad shouted after him. “Careful with that door! I want the whole security deposit back. I’ll never have enough for a down payment on a house for your mother if you destroy the place.”

 

Dean lay on the twin bed in the pink bedroom (this rental seemed to assume anyone who moved in would have young children; there was a girls’ room and a boys’ room, and how did Dean end up stuck with the girls’ room, anyway?), missing the bunker, its lorebooks and supernatural objects, its freaky futuristic-for-the-1930s technology, its warding. Its elegance.

He missed hunting. He missed it like hell. How many times over the years since Dad died had he or Sam wished, spoken or unspoken, for a normal life? They encountered normal, happy people living normal, happy lives all the time, and there was a wistfulness, a there-but-for-the-curse-of-being-a-Winchester feeling, that maybe, in an alternate reality, that could have been theirs.

Then, suddenly, it was. Okay, a twisted, weird version of it, where their parents were flummoxed by modern technology and their children were rough-and-tumble, fully grown men, far more worldly-wise than either of their parents had ever been ... which struck Dean every day. It was natural, he guessed, for a kid to assume his parents knew everything, but every day brought new evidence of his parents’ naivete, about the modern world, about hunting, even basic facts about life and death. Dean supposed he and Sam each had a lot more years logged on this planet than Mom ever did, and as for Dad ... he was such a revenge-obsessed wreck after Mom died, he too kind of stopped living when she died. Sam and Dean took on a parental role too often for comfort, steering them through the technological jungle they were always getting tripped up in, giving them advice about work and money and survival .... Dean even once overheard Sam giving Mom relationship advice, _about their Dad_. It was all mixed up and upside down. They were the parents, relegated to these tiny children’s rooms in this town not their own where they had nothing to do, while Mom and Dad still called the shots. 

Mom and Dad were making their way through the world in their own way. It was ironic, since it was Mom’s and Dad’s choices that had led Sam and Dean inexorably to the way they lived now, but if nothing else had become clear in the weeks since they moved into this place, it was that the lives Mom and Dad were choosing for themselves now that they had another chance at them had nothing in common with the lives Sam and Dean lived. Had always lived. _Wanted_ to live.

He guessed he had gotten what he needed most: to realize the life he was already living, in the bunker with Sam, was the life he most wanted. Let Mom and Dad have their second chance at life. He had to get on with his own. It had gone way beyond saving people and hunting things. Now they were saving the world, hunting the things no one else even knew how to handle. It was hard, but it was kickass, too.

He got up, packed his duffle, slipped Baby’s key off Dad’s keyring on the key rack, and knocked on Sam’s door.

“Come in.”

Dean opened the door to blue walls and a couple of airplane mobiles hanging from the ceiling. “Nice décor,” Dean teased.

“Back atcha,” said Sam. Dean’s room featured unicorn mobiles. He eyed the duffle Dean was holding, and sat up.

“Screw it,” Dean said to Sam. “We’re goin’ home.”


End file.
